Windblown

There’s a specific kind of dread that follows a beloved studio’s next act. Motion Twin made Dead Cells, a 2D roguelite that felt different from its peers—responsive, punishing, and endlessly generous with its systems. So the obvious question hanging over Windblown is whether the studio had a second great idea or just a variation on the first. The answer, based on the Steam Early Access build that launched October 24, 2024, is emphatic: this is not Dead Cells in a new coat. This is Motion Twin taking everything they learned about speed and feedback and rebuilding it in three dimensions.

Windblown drops you into a broken world under siege by the Vortex, an apocalyptic force chewing through a landscape of floating islands. You play a Leaper, and the fantasy here is pure velocity—you dash across arenas at a speed that would feel reckless in almost any other game. Between runs, you return to a hub, reawaken the powers of fallen warriors, gather materials, and refine a loadout drawn from a genuinely deep well of gear.

Positioned squarely in the crowded co-op roguelite market—think Hades, Risk of Rain 2, Enter the Gungeon—Windblown differentiates on two fronts: its obsessive commitment to mobility, and its Alterattack weapon-combo system. The 1.0 release is targeted for 2026, meaning what you’re buying today is a promise with an exceptionally strong down payment. This is a review of that down payment.

• The Alterattack System: Equip two weapons and chain between them to trigger powerful combo finishers. This is the mechanical heart of the game—it rewards aggression and punishes hesitation, turning weapon selection into a puzzle about synergy rather than raw damage.
• Dash-Based Movement: Not a dodge you use sparingly. Your dash is your primary verb—traversal, evasion, and offense collapse into a single input that keeps you perpetually in motion.
• Enormous Build Diversity: 25+ weapons, 20 trinkets, 100+ passive upgrades, 20 hexes, and magifish companions. The permutation math alone guarantees you won’t repeat yourself for a long time.
• 1–3 Player Online Co-op: Team up with up to two friends to coordinate builds, split loot, and gang up on bosses. Co-op is designed in, not bolted on.

The Gameplay Loop

Most roguelites ask you to be patient. They teach you to read attack patterns, wait for openings, and respect the enemy’s space. Windblown asks the opposite. It wants you to close distance constantly, to treat standing still as a mistake, to weaponize your own recklessness. The dash is near-frictionless, and the game builds every encounter around the assumption that you’re always moving. Enemies telegraph, sure, but the answer to a telegraph is rarely “back off”—it’s “dash through it and hit them from behind.”

This is where the design sings. The moment-to-moment combat has a rhythm built for addiction, and the Alterattack system is what makes it expressive rather than merely fast. By equipping two weapons and swapping between them mid-combo, you charge and unleash finishers that hit like a truck. The system forces you to think about your loadout as a two-part sentence: the setup and the payoff. A fast weapon to build the meter, a heavy one to spend it. Or two weapons whose finishers cover different ranges. The depth reveals itself slowly, and the ceiling is high.

Progression and Build-Crafting

Between runs, the hub loop follows the genre template—spend materials, unlock permanent upgrades, chip away at meta-progression—but the sheer volume of build components is the differentiator. With 100+ passive upgrades and 20 hexes layering onto your weapon choices, individual runs develop personalities. One run you’re a glass cannon dashing through boss arenas praying your finisher lands first. The next you’re a grinding attrition build stacking damage-over-time hexes. This variety is the engine of replayability, and it mostly works.

Mostly. Here’s the honest part: the meta-progression, while deep in options, doesn’t yet have the narrative pull that made Dead Cells’ and Hades’ loops so sticky. You’re gathering materials and unlocking powers, but the game doesn’t always give you a compelling reason to chase the next unlock beyond “more numbers.” That’s a design gap, not a fatal flaw, and it’s exactly the kind of thing an Early Access period exists to fix.

Co-op

Solo, Windblown is built to be excellent. With three Leapers, it becomes something else by design—a chaotic, screen-filling scramble where builds interlock, one player’s hex combos with another’s weapon, and bosses melt in ways nobody planned. Co-op does expose the game’s balance seams; encounters tuned for solo play can feel trivialized or, occasionally, overwhelming with three players dashing through the same tight arena. But the social energy is real, and this is clearly the mode Motion Twin wants you to fall in love with.

The Honest Caveats

This is Early Access, and it shows in specific, predictable ways. Biome variety is thin. The same environments recur enough to notice their edges. Endgame depth is limited—once the loop is mastered, the game runs out of new mountains to point you at. And balance is a work in progress, with certain weapon combinations trivializing content while others read as dead weight. None of these are surprising for the stage. All of them are the difference between “great” and “genre-defining.”

The art direction is a clear evolution of Motion Twin’s house style—hand-crafted, vibrant, and readable even at the game’s absurd speeds. That last part matters more than it sounds. When you’re dashing across an arena three times a second, visual clarity isn’t a luxury; it’s a survival mechanic. Windblown mostly nails it, keeping your character and incoming threats legible against busy backdrops. The 3D shift from Dead Cells’ 2D pixel art hasn’t cost the game any of its personality.

A 3D game of this scope is light on hardware, and the design leans on tight, low-latency input as a foundation: the whole game depends on the connection between button press and on-screen action being immediate enough that deaths feel earned rather than robbed. That responsiveness is the whole ballgame, and Motion Twin has clearly built around it.

Windblown is a Steam exclusive for now, and it’s built for it. On mouse-and-keyboard, the dash-heavy movement translates cleanly, and the precision of aiming directional attacks feels natural. But this is, frankly, a controller game. The twin-stick-adjacent flow of moving with one hand and orienting attacks with the other maps to a gamepad like it was designed there first. Steam’s controller support is excellent, and we recommend nearly everyone start with a pad. The Steam co-op infrastructure—invites, matchmaking, sessions—is unobtrusive and matches how you’ll actually want to play: firing off an invite to friends and jumping straight into a run.

Windblown is the answer to that opening question, and it’s a strong one: Motion Twin didn’t get lucky the first time. They understand, at a molecular level, what makes action feel good—and they’ve rebuilt that understanding into something faster, more aggressive, and more social than Dead Cells ever was. The Alterattack system is a fresh idea in a genre that recycles heavily, and the moment-to-moment combat stands with the best the genre currently offers.

What holds it back is exactly what should hold back an Early Access game: it’s not finished. The biomes repeat, the endgame thins out, and the meta-loop doesn’t yet grab you by the collar the way the combat does. Buy it now if you want to play something exhilarating today and don’t mind rough edges. Wait for 1.0 in 2026 if you need your games complete. Either way, put it on your radar—because when Motion Twin finishes this, it has every chance of being one of the best co-op roguelites on the market. Right now, it’s one of the most promising.